A bill that has sometimes tripled
For many IT managers, the wake-up call was brutal. When renewing their VMware licences, the virtualisation foundation they had been running without a second thought for years, they discovered quotes out of all proportion to the previous ones. Depending on the configuration, the bill doubled, sometimes tripled, turning a stable budget line into an item that became hard to justify.
This shock is not a billing accident; it is the direct consequence of a change of strategy. Since Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, the vendor has completely overhauled how its products are sold, with an open focus on large customers. Small and medium-sized organisations, long loyal customers, find themselves facing a model that was no longer designed for them.
The dominant feeling among those affected is not just that of a price rise, but of a loss of control. Overnight, a foundation taken for granted becomes a variable imposed from outside, whose price is set elsewhere with no real room for negotiation. It is this feeling, as much as the size of the bill, that is now pushing so many organisations to reopen a file they thought closed for years, and to ask whether their dependence on a single supplier was really sensible.
What changed in the licensing model
The first upheaval is the end of perpetual licences. You no longer buy a version of VMware and run it for as long as you like: you take out a subscription that must be renewed to keep receiving updates and support. This shift to renting, common in software, was carried out here without consideration, removing options many relied on.
The second change concerns the structure of the offering. Products once available individually have been grouped into broader bundles, often charged per processor core, with minimum thresholds. A small business that only needed the hypervisor is now offered a complete suite of which it will use only a fraction, while paying for all of it. This combination, mandatory subscription and imposed scope, explains the scale of the increases.
Pay, migrate or wait: a decision to make calmly
In this situation, the worst reaction would be to decide in a hurry, out of anger or anxiety. Three paths are open, and none is universally right: it depends on the size of the estate, in-house skills and how critical the hosted applications are.
Renew with VMware: makes sense for a large estate heavily reliant on advanced features; watch out for a lasting cost increase and a negotiation to conduct.
Migrate to Proxmox: suits organisations seeking a proven open-source alternative; watch out for upskilling and changing habits.
Switch to Hyper-V: suits environments already strongly oriented towards Microsoft; watch out for consistency with the Windows licences in place.
Rethink the infrastructure: suits an ageing estate where an overhaul was already being considered; it is a broader project than a simple change of tool.
What matters is to set against each option its full cost over several years, not just the first year's price. A renewal that looks expensive can remain rational for a critical, complex environment, while a migration that looks attractive on paper can prove heavy if the team does not have the time to absorb it.
Between the two most common alternatives, the choice often depends on what is already in place. Proxmox, built on proven open-source components, appeals through the absence of licence costs and an active community, at the price of upskilling on a new environment. Hyper-V, part of the Microsoft ecosystem, fits more naturally where the estate already runs largely on Windows Server, since it relies on licences and tools the team already knows. Neither is superior in absolute terms: the right candidate is the one that matches your in-house skills and your applications, not the one with the best spec sheet.
Migration is not free either
This is the point enthusiasm often overlooks. Leaving VMware for an alternative such as Proxmox removes the vendor's bill, but introduces other, less visible costs. Operating procedures must be requalified, teams retrained, automations rewritten, the compatibility of backups and third-party tools checked, and a transition period accepted during which you have less command of your environment.
These costs are real, but they differ in nature from the licence increase: they are one-off and lead to a platform you are once again in control of, instead of a dependency whose price escapes all control. Done well, a migration is planned in stages, starting with the least sensitive workloads, so as to validate each step before going further. That is the gradual approach followed by our virtualisation migration service.
Timing matters as much as the choice
In this matter, timing is as important as the decision itself. A virtualisation migration cannot be improvised the day before a contract expires: it requires testing, validating backups, training teams and moving workloads in stages, several months of work for a sizeable estate. Leaving it too late means ending up with your back to the wall, forced to renew with the vendor for lack of a ready alternative, and so paying top price.
Opening the subject well ahead of the deadline, by contrast, changes the balance of power. You give yourself time to try out a solution on a limited scope, to cost each scenario seriously and, if need be, to negotiate your renewal from a stronger position because you have a credible way out. The worst position remains passive waiting, which turns a strategic decision into a rushed reaction, taken under time pressure rather than on the basis of the figures.
Taking back control of software costs
The VMware case is only the most spectacular sign of a wider trend. Major vendors regularly revise their models, bundle their offerings and push towards subscriptions, and an organisation that undergoes these changes without anticipating them sees its software costs drift item by item. Taking back control means knowing precisely what you own, what you really use and what you are paying for nothing.
It is often while carrying out this inventory that you discover subscriptions piled up over one-off needs, tools bought for an abandoned project but never cancelled, or licence tiers oversized relative to actual use. Taking back control is not only about reacting to a price rise imposed by a vendor, but about setting up a regular review of your software assets, just as you track other spending items. It is the difference between enduring your IT costs and managing them, and it widens year after year.
Our IT audit service helps carry out this review and build a sustainable path, rather than moving from one costly dependency to another. The aim is not to flee a vendor on principle, but to choose with full knowledge.
If your latest VMware invoice made you wince, now is the right time to put the figures on the table. Let's talk about your infrastructure.
Sources: Flexera, Broadcom ends perpetual licences for VMware products · Proxmox VE, official website